Deliverance as a Runaway Slave Narrative

When Burt Reynolds died last August, the obits recounted the strange life of an iconic American actor. Particularly weird was how Reynolds often lied about where he was born. He said he was born Waycross, Georgia. Why anyone born in Lansing, Michigan would want to be from Waycross, Georgia is a baffling question. What we do know is that Reynolds, who always identified as southern, and even affected a twang to fit the image, was, with this odd fib, participating in a cultural practice with roots dating back to nineteenth-century plantation culture. Burt Reynolds was “storying.”

To best understand storying one could do worse than turn to Kevin Young’s The Grey Album. Slaves, denied evidence of their heritage, resorted to counterfeiting tactics to recover a sense of identity and community. The trickster, separated from self, society, and family, storied his way to survival. It was a strategic embellishment, a move that allowed enslaved African Americans and their descendants to “forge their own traditions . . . even their own freedom.” Ultimately, it was a habit of mind, one most urgently cultivated in the hothouse of necessity—usually underground, down in the hole, trying to escape the master.

If Reynolds’ penchant for storying led him to identify as southern, his role in the 1972 movie Deliverance, based on the novel of the same name, allowed that penchant to intersect with art. Based on the novel by the Georgia writer James Dickey (who also wrote the screenplay), Deliverance is an underappreciated and misunderstood film, one in which Reynolds clearly thrived as a swarthy Lewis Medlock. The movie is typically characterized as a thriller, or (more generously) as a psychological and physical journey undertaken by four Atlanta suburbanites on a canoe trip down North Georgia’s Coossawattee River.